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PA As a Stochastic Process Anti-Essentialism in Public Administration Conference A decentering tendency has undermined the foundations of public administration theory Fort Lauderdale, FL March 2-3, 2007 Theorizing Public Administration as a Stochastic Process Catherine Horiuchi University of San Francisco Working Paper: Not for attribution or citation with author’s permission Abstract The capacity of information networks to capture and manipulate ever-larger streams of globally acquired, real-time data accelerates fragmentation of traditional public administration protocols, away from managing stable states toward temporary and permeable framing of governmental and corporate interests. Technologies simultaneously provide historic opportunities for dissent, individualism, and small-d democratic movements. Intermittent, overlapping governance – characterized by private government, small wars, state failures, and opportunistic shifts of power and capital from public stewardship to private parties – results in ideological or pragmatic retreats from and progressions of institutional boundaries. Ephemeral balances rather than negotiated long-term settlements demark the edges of public and private. This fluidity of realms increasingly affects the duration and allocation of administrative responsibilities between formerly firmly edged divisions of local, state, and national governments. The assumption of a static state in public administration theory does not hold. Government becomes a metaphorical fluid, an eddy that retains its shape more or less, long enough to become an object of analysis and action. The new assumption of administrative fluidity invokes a world of measurement estimating impacts of partially ordered and partially stochastic events. Sensemaking derives from sophisticated evaluative and probabilistic analyses. Traditional construction of the field with its assumption of durable governmental operations may no longer be a best-fit theory for multi-layered, ephemeral states. Theorizing Public Administration as a Stochastic Process Introduction A casual observer might be forgiven for thinking academic preparation for practitioners in the field called public administration involves traversing rudimentary courses in a loose collection of social sciences and administrative training, grounded in scholarly studies and practitioner reports of these practices in collective action. These concepts and practices have been gathered together over the past century in an occasionally haphazard but generally straightforward fashion, responding to the ebb and flow of public judgment about the roles and responsibilities of governing institutions. This constructionist approach to public administration extends to the training of its professoriate and the development of the field’s curricula. Public Administration finds its basis in a series of postulates and assumptions of public governance, first established in the earliest written documents, periodically tested and revised. Bedrock of these assumptions in modern public administration is that of a stable state. In its absence, we assume humanity exists in anarchy or anomie. This stability is assumed to last, at minimum, long enough for any of the field’s trained practitioners to act and be recognized as a successful manager of public interests through application of this study of collected concepts. In the one-class-per-field model of public administration, a typical curriculum skims organizational theory, economics, law, policy formulation, program implementation, ethics, and management, with a smattering of statistics and analytic techniques. The closing decade of the 20th century and the opening years of the 21st century offer considerable evidence suggesting this assumption of stability results in practitioners Horiuchi: Stochastic Process 1 who despite this collective study may not respond appropriately in the likely range of situations a typical administrator will encounter. Professional education and research based on this implicit postulate does not offer practitioners the best possible preparation for public participation and service. Long before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and accelerated thereafter in concert with the increasing power and capacity of electronic data systems, the US government’s law enforcement and national security interests sought the capacity to capture, catalog, and analyze data related to subjects of investigation. With ubiquitous systems and networks came the possibility to capture and store for an undetermined period of time every imaginable bit of information on all possible distinct persons. The exponential increase in storage capacity and new software programs to capture and assign meaning to streaming data is reframing the role of government and its relationship to corporate interests whose cooperation is essential, as much of the data management infrastructure is privately owned and managed. These and other technologies of mass data transfer simultaneously provide historic opportunities for dissent, individualism, and democratic actions. No event is too mundane to be captured and posted online, potential affecting overlapping government structures, from neighborhoods to nations-states through the immediacy offered in network communications. There would be little impetus to commit so much government planning and assessment to these technological advances if existing administrative practices worked superbly in all instances. To the degree these adoptions reflect explicit or implicit problems, they should be examined to consider whether they improve or worsen Horiuchi: Stochastic Process 2 outcomes and democratic processes. One frequent observation is the speed and constancy of changes which governments must address, that is, a perceived need for administrative fluidity and responsiveness. An assumption of administrative fluidity invokes a world of measurement estimating impacts of partially ordered and partially stochastic events. The use of computers to assist decision makers and governance operatives in their sensemaking under variable conditions and time-sensitivity, demonstrates an intention to include as many known and measurable variables as possible to better model the entire universe of possible causes and effects. A sense of fluidity and impermanence is nothing new, particularly in politics, where officials can rise and fall with bad practice or bad luck. As Lord Palmerston, 19th century British Prime Minister noted, a state enjoys “… no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests.” (Lord Palmerston, 1848) These concerns were less troublesome in the past, however. Modern life has given us tightly-coupled systems that are not capable of being completely free of unexpected effects. (Perrow, 1984; Taleb 2004) Public administration theorists and practitioners might consider radical restructuring, beginning with revision of fundamental assumptions and concepts. This can lead to the development of a new set of competencies to manage stochastic and short- lived administrative constructs. I begin by reviewing the concept of randomness, and continue with a discussion of the problems in existing assumptions. The technical response to the problem is described, governmental efforts to reduce randomness and error through complete information. Three cases are considered for the role of Horiuchi: Stochastic Process 3 randomness. Lastly, ideas are offered toward restructuring assumptions that might result in greater explanatory power regarding public responsiveness. Regarding Randomness, or Stochastic Events and Processes A stochastic event or instance can be consider a random, uncontrolled input that affects a process of otherwise fully specified character so that, despite following known rules and acting within acknowledged constraints, the outcome cannot be accurately anticipated. A stochastic process might characterize either an unknown system that is acting on persons and conditions, or a system with random effects that interacts with a known process in a non-periodic, unforeseeable manner. Central to these descriptions is the concept of randomness, at least from the point of reference of those acted upon by the stochastic process. Inherent is a tantalizing potential for reducing seemingly random and stochastic effects through more complete knowledge. If a substantial number of events are random, can we argue that public leadership simply cannot manage to minimize damage to populations? Perhaps, but such an argument is pointless and fails the test of political legitimacy. Rather, similar to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the Hawthorne studies, let us assume we affect any system merely through observation and study. If so, the field of public administration may develop useful knowledge and modify praxis through acknowledgement of and investigation around these random effects. Eagle (2005) addresses what he considers an unjust neglect in the study of the concept of randomness, which he considers a special case of a process’s unpredictability. This randomness is not mere indeterminism, and a better understanding of the concept as unpredictability makes it useful in discriminating between various theories. Randomness Horiuchi: Stochastic Process 4 is a key concept in chaos theory, and for any dynamic process that is modeled with a probability component. Human behavior, and by extension human organizational systems, are also usefully modeled as random processes (Eagle, 752). Limitations on predictability can be categorized as
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